Neil

(As told to and written down by Virginia Hinson) Life for the Montagnard indigenous groups in the Central Highlands of Vietnam had been tranquil for hundreds of years as families in small villages made up of longhouses clustered at the edge of the jungle raised their children and cultivated their small gardens of vegetables, rice, and banana trees. All this drastically changed with the Vietnam War. In the aftermath of the war, about 85% of the Montagnard villages would be destroyed, families would be torn apart, and thousands of villagers would lose their lives.

I was born on October 31st, 1975, six months after the end of the Vietnam War, in the city of Pleiku, located in the Central Highlands of Vietnam. The fourth child in my family, I was named Tao Ktul Nay, a name that described my family’s circumstances at the time of my birth. My first name, “Tao” means “a person being sent to a re-education camp,” which had happened to my father just six months before my birth. My second name, “Ktul,” reflected my mother’s Rhade tribal heritage, and my last name, “Nay,” represented my father’s Jarai tribal heritage. My parents had met while they were in school in Ban Me Thuot (Buon Ama Thuot) and were now living in Pleiku with my older brother and my two older sisters. Sadly, I would not get to know my father until I was 19 years old. Before the war reprisals came to the Central Highlands, my father was a highly esteemed man in our town. He had graduated from the Saigon National Institute in 1969 and was currently working as the Ethnics Minority Development Minister at the Ethnic Minority Development Center in Pleiku. His duties involved improving the lives of the Montagnard people of the Central Highlands and defending them against Vietnamese people who coveted the tribal lands. Unknown to him, he had come under surveillance by the Vietnamese authorities in the district who were suspicious of his interactions with the American advisors in the area. On April 13, 1975, life for my family changed forever. That evening around 11:30 P.M., the district police entered our home, pointed an AK-47 to my father’s head, hand-cuffed him, and took him away into the night. With his hands still cuffed behind his back and his feet tied together, he was thrown into a pit beside the local police headquarters. The next day the district police took him back to our home to get some clothes. My mother, three months pregnant with me, was devastated at the sight of her husband. His body had been badly bruised by the rough treatment he had received, and he was covered with bites from ants and other insects living in the pit. Stifling her sobs, she quickly gathered some clothes and a few other necessary items for him to take to Truong Cai Huan, a communist re-education camp for political prisoners. Charged with and convicted of being an American spy and bribing the local government officials, my father was sentenced to hard labor at the “re-education camp” in the jungle. On arrival at the camp, he was locked inside a totally dark underground cell for 24 days. His cell, custom-built for high profile “criminals,” had a ceiling of 3 to 4 feet, so he could not stand up except for times when he was taken to a bathroom. Under the cramped conditions, his feet became numb, and he could hardly walk on the rare occasions he was allowed out of his cell. After three and a half weeks in the dark cell, he began his hard labor, days spent cutting down trees to clear the jungle. I was born while my father was in the camp. When I was two months old, my mother received word that my father had been transferred to the Gia Trung Prison Camp, deep in the jungle near Pleiku. For eight months she had not known of his whereabouts or if he was even alive. She wrapped me up and carried me in a sling on her back to visit him. She continued to visit until one day my father whispered to her, “Don’t come any more. I won’t be here long.” He had met some other Montagnard people who were being held at the camp, and together they were making a plan to escape. At the camp, though the prisoners were in separate cells, the walls between the cells were just rebar supports, and the prisoners had found a way to communicate when the guards were not nearby. The prisoners had observed that certain of the night guards went to sleep when they were supposed to be on duty, so a carefully planned escape might be possible. Late one night in January of 1976, as the guards slept, my dad and four other prisoners escaped into the jungle. The other four were caught, but by God’s grace, my father managed to elude capture. In the jungle, he met up with some members of the FULRO, the Montagnard Resistance fighters, and joined them as assistant commander. On February 17, 1976, when I was four months old, my mother took me to see him at Plei Kanh, District A, in GiaLai, where he was temporarily hiding out. The next time we saw my dad was in the summer of 1978, when we were living in the village of Buon Cu Dlue, Ban Me Thuot, in the DakLak province. One day my father cautiously approached a man from the village of Buon Cu Dlue who was working alone in his field. My father asked the villager to contact my mother to request that she meet him in the field the next day. That evening my mother and my cousin prepared rice, food, and clothes to take to my father. The next morning my mother sneaked out of the village to meet him at the corner of the rice field. She would not see him again until 1994. He would eventually make his way to a refugee camp in Thailand, but until then he had no way of safely getting a message to us. We would not know that he was alive until he managed to send a letter to my mother in 1982. After my father’s arrest in 1975, my mother had been forced by the communists to sell our home in Pleiku at a great loss and move back to Ban Me Thuot, where she had some family. We moved in with my maternal grandmother and my uncle, my mother’s oldest brother, who had built a traditional Montagnard longhouse in the village. I enjoyed life in our longhouse, which stood high off the ground and had no partitions between the rooms. This meant that when my bedtime came, I could put my plastic sleeping mat down on the floor anywhere I wanted to. Since there were gaps between the planks of the wooden floor of our longhouse, the nights would get cold, and I would share a blanket or a pillow with whichever relative was closest to me. We used oil lamps for lighting as electricity would not come to our village until 1992. Fortunately for us, we had a well which we shared with our neighbors so we had plenty of water for cooking and for washing our clothes. For safety sake, we boiled all of our drinking water. We would go down to a nearby stream for our baths. Though water was plentiful, food was not. Our meals consisted mainly of dried fish and rice, low grade commodities that we could buy cheaply because we just didn’t have the money for better quality food like pork or beef. As we children got older, we started growing a garden with corn and vegetables, which we would mix with the rice to make it stretch to feed all of us. We also grew bok choy, lettuce, and green onions; and later we raised chickens and pigs. My mother worked hard to support us, but there just was not enough money to buy adequate food. When I was six years old, I began my education at the village school, where my cousin was a teacher. The whole school consisted of 50 students, and my first grade class had 10-15 students. I remember that I was the tallest one in the class! One of my memories of this school was that when I was in the third grade, I had a tough and strict teacher who was very serious about enforcing the school dress code. All the male students were required to keep their fingernails short and clean, and to make sure we all complied, he checked our nails at the beginning of class each day. If he thought a student’s nails were too long, the boy would have to spread his fingers out on the table while the teacher struck them with a wooden ruler that was two meters long. Most of our lessons at this school consisted of our memorizing certain passages and reciting them in front of the class the next day. The teacher would call on each student to go to the blackboard in front of the class and recite the previous day’s lesson. If the student could not remember the recitation, he would have to stand in front of the blackboard for a long time. The teacher would give one hint, but if the student still did not remember, the teacher would yell, “Why didn’t you study? Where did you go?” Then he would grab the student’s hair and bang his head into the blackboard before sending him back to his seat. I remember being very embarrassed one time when I did not study well and had this punishment applied to me! I was really glad when I moved onto fourth grade and had my cousin as my teacher. When I was in the fifth grade, I moved to a different school about 4 km (2.5 miles) outside of the village. Because my mother could not afford to buy a bicycle for me to ride, I had to walk to school every day, sometimes through a soaking rain. I did not have a backpack so I had to carry my books, pens, and pencils. At this school I began to learn to speak the Vietnamese language because the classes were taught in Vietnamese by Vietnamese teachers. I was in a class with both Vietnamese and Montagnard students. I admit that I was not an especially good student because I loved to sit in the back of the room and talk with my friends instead of concentrating on my lessons. I remember that on one occasion I was talking with a friend instead of paying attention to the teacher as he was lecturing and writing something on the board. He heard me, turned around, grabbed a book, and threw it at me from fifteen feet away! Fortunately he missed me! Without a word he stalked out of class, presumably to report me to the principal. Ten minutes later he walked back into the classroom and warned me that if I was caught talking again while he was lecturing, I would be expelled from his class. I do have one memory of something I did in the sixth grade that I still regret. The teacher regularly gave us a dictation that would be graded the next day. He would read a sentence in Vietnamese, pause, and then repeat the sentence. We had to write the dictation with correct spelling and punctuation. I had a hard time staying up with him because I was still learning the Vietnamese language, and the teacher read so fast. One day I was especially frustrated with my inability to keep up. When we had a 10- minute break during the class and most of my classmates had gone outside, I asked one of the Vietnamese students sitting a row in front of me if I could borrow his paper to check what I had missed. He refused, so I grabbed his shirt and threatened to hit him if he did not let me see his paper. He freaked out and said, “You can’t do that!” But he must have seen my desperation because at last he gave me his paper. I was fortunate that he did not tell on me because I would have been in some serious trouble; but at my age of 12 or 13, I did not realize that I was cheating. All I was thinking about was getting my paper done so it could be graded, and I wouldn’t be punished for it being incomplete.Life was very hard in those days for my mom, now a single mother of four. She was assigned a job with the Vietnamese Sugar Cane Production Company working in the sugar cane fields located three miles from our home. She had to cut the cane, tie up bundles of 10 to 20 stalks, carry them on her shoulders to the end of the line, and then stack up the bundles so that they would be ready for the tractors to pick up and take to the factory. There the stalks would be pressed for juice and the juice boiled until thick syrup formed, from which sugar would then be made. This was a tough and heavy labor for my mom. We children were trained from an early age to work to help support our family. In Vietnam we grew two kinds of rice; one kind is planted on dry land and is dependent on the rain for growth. The other kind is planted in the mud in rice paddies. We planted both kinds of rice and also worked on a coffee plantation. It was hard to balance school and work, but we had no other choice; in order to survive, we had to work.While we were struggling for survival in Buon Cu Dlue, Ban Me Thuot, my father was struggling for survival in the jungle. In 1982 he finally made it across the border to a refugee camp in Thailand. We received one letter from him, the first news we had had for years, letting us know that he was alive. After intensive negotiations with the American government, he and his group were granted refugee status; and in 1986, he came to the United States. Sponsored by Christ the King Lutheran Church in Cary, North Carolina, he settled in Raleigh. The church hired him as a custodian to take care of the church building and property. He also worked in a restaurant at the Raleigh-Durham airport while attending school to earn an associate degree in electronics. In 1990 he began sending money to our family back in Vietnam and told us that he was filing the necessary paperwork to bring us to the United States.The Vietnamese government was not at all in favor of our immigration to the U.S. and refused to let us leave. Every day my mom would ride her bicycle to the government offices to plead for our permission to leave. We knew that we would probably have to resort to bribing the officials so we saved the money my father sent us and bought a unit of gold. In 1992, my father was able to get our paperwork transferred to Saigon City where he had heard there was a Catholic nun who would help people wishing to emigrate. My brother and I traveled to Saigon City to meet her and to see what we could do to expedite the process. However, the local officials in Ban Me Thuot became very angry when they found out that our papers had been transferred away from their control, and they continued to hold our passports for another two years. This meant that we could not get an exit interview. My father then sent a letter signed by his pastor and friends from his church in Raleigh to Warren Christopher, secretary of state under President Clinton, asking him to intervene on behalf of the family. Secretary Christopher sent a telegram putting pressure on the Prime Minister of Vietnam, Vo Van Kiet, to release the necessary documents. At Christmas of 1993, we were notified that we would be summoned to an exit interview; and on January 14, 1994, we were finally able to board a plane leaving Vietnam. Our flight took us from Saigon City to the Philippines, then to Tokyo, and on to San Francisco and Washington, D.C. before we landed in Raleigh, North Carolina. At the Raleigh airport we were met by a group of people. One man from the group came up to us and started hugging my mother. That must be my dad, I thought. I had seen an old photo of him, but I had not seen him in person since I was a tiny baby. Now at last, I would get to know my father. My first impression of the United States was that it was cold! I had never been so cold in my life! Next, I couldn’t believe all the trees I saw. I had somehow thought that the United States was one immense city! But I was not so crazy about American food. I just couldn’t eat it, and I found that I could not tolerate drinking milk. Learning English was my first order of business in my new country. Ladies from my father’s church in Raleigh came to our apartment to teach us English. I had learned a little English while I lived in Vietnam so I picked it up pretty easily. After six months, I enrolled in Wake Technical Community College to study English as a Second Language. After reaching level 5, I began studying for my associate degree in computer and electronic engineering. In 2002 a new group of refugees from Vietnam came to America, and I worked as an interpreter for them with Lutheran Family Services.As I began a new life in the United States, I also began my new life in Christ. All of my family except my older brother and me had accepted Christ as their Savior while still in Vietnam. When we arrived in the U.S., we started going to church, and I began learning more about my need for salvation. Though the gospel had been explained to me before, I didn’t really understand what it meant to believe and accept Christ. Then my dad bought each of us an English Bible, and as I read it, the Holy Spirit began to work in my life. In mid-1995 my brother and I, along with several other Montagnard men who had also made a decision to follow Christ, were baptized by Pastors Gabe Galdo and Mloi Rmah at Westside Chapel in Greensboro. Keo Eban served as the translator for Pastor Gabe’s message before and after the baptism service. A couple of years later, I joined the Montagnard youth choir at church.Another shift in my life came about when I decided to change my first name from Tao, which means “one being sent to a re-education camp,” to a more American-sounding name. At the time, I was doing an internship at Buehler Products in Cary, North Carolina, and I met a co-worker named Neil Jerry. For some reason, I was fascinated by the name “Neil.” Later on, I learned that Neil Armstrong was the first person to ever set foot on the moon. That did it: I decided to change my name to “Neil.” After I filled out the necessary paperwork for the Register of Deeds in Raleigh, I sent a copy of the name change form to a cousin in Vietnam so that my birth certificate would be officially reissued. Then I had the task of changing all my identification cards to Neil Ktul Nay. Some of my Montagnard friends still call me Tao, but most have adjusted to my new name of “Neil.”The next two years brought even more changes to my life. On September 20, 2002, I officially became an American citizen; and then in August 2003, I enrolled in UNC-Charlotte to earn a degree in electrical engineering. My move to Charlotte would prove a turning point in my life. First, as I was finishing my senior year at UNC-Charlotte, I was hired to work part-time at Solectron Technology, a contract manufacturer near the university. Next, I met a very special young lady, H’Dera Siu, at a youth choir practice. I asked a friend who that “cute girl” was. I was too shy to ask her out myself, so I asked my friend to find out if she would go out with me. When my friend called H’Dera later on that night, I got on the phone, and we started talking. I got up my courage to ask her to meet me for lunch a couple of days later. Our first date was a walk around a mall and then lunch at Red Lobster. I remember that I had to call my supervisor at work to request permission to be a little late to work. He must have recognized that this was not just a casual lunch because he was very understanding. Soon I was calling H’Dera during my breaks at work, and after I got off work at midnight on my second-shift job. We were engaged on October 6, 2007, and our wedding day was August 30, 2008. After I graduated from UNC-Charlotte, I began working full-time for Solectron, but I soon learned that I had to work every Sunday, which meant I had to miss church services. At the time, I didn’t have many options because I knew that I had to begin paying off my student loans six months after graduation. I started to look for a better job opportunity, and in 2006 I applied for a job with Tyco Electronics in Winston-Salem. Though I was called for an interview, I was not hired. A few months later, I resubmitted my resume to Tyco. Two long, agonizing months after my second interview, I received a phone call from the hiring manager with an offer of employment. I was so excited that I started yelling and jumping onto my bed a few times. In February 2007, I moved to Greensboro to begin work with Tyco, now called TE Connectivity, in the engineering development lab, where I support product engineers, test and evaluate finished products, and design new generation back-bone connectors for data centers.While living in Charlotte, I also became involved in helping to start a new Montagnard church in the area. I became the liaison between our Montagnard leaders and Rev. Thomas Bowden, the former South Atlantic District Church Planting director, and Rev. Ferrell Towns, the former South Atlantic District superintendent. As the primary contact person, I did all the necessary paper work to get the church approved by the district and registered in Mecklenburg County. The pastor and senior members of the new church approved my suggestion that the church be named “Anak Cu Chiang (Children of the Mountains) Alliance Church.” Now H’Dera and I attend Westside Chapel, where I serve as a deacon, and H’Dera and I work with the youth. Our lives were incredibly blessed with the addition of H’Victoria Siu Nay, born on September 7, 2011 at the Sara Lee Women’s Center, Forsyth Medical Center in Winston-Salem, NC. This precious daughter given to us by God has made our lives complete.